High-profile campaign lawyer Jim Sutton has gotten his old law firm slapped with the biggest ethics fine in San Francisco history – nearly a quarter-million dollars – for failing to properly report the $800,000 donation Pacific Gas and Electric Co. made to help defeat a public power initiative in 2002. San Francisco Ethics Commission director […]

“With this merger we will be able to say to any corporate client anywhere in the world, ‘There is nothing we can’t assist you with. You will never be able to outgrow us. We will always be able to look after you.’ This will change the legal landscape.” Change the legal landscape? To be sure,

Defense lawyers in the Walt Disney trial on Friday tried to undermine the credibility of a witness who testified that company directors neglected their oversight duties when they hired and later fired the president, Michael S. Ovitz. The witness, Prof. John J. Donohue III of Yale, concluded on Thursday that Disney could have saved $140

Promoters pay radio stations annual fees for advance copies of playlists and bill record companies for each new song played, running up a tab that costs the industry tens of millions of dollars annually. Financial woes and piracy have caused the labels to cut back on such payments. New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer

The trials of seven men on Pitcairn Island, the remote Pacific island home to descendants of HMS Bounty mutineers, were drawing to a close Thursday and judges were expected to deliver their verdicts Monday. The cases against the men — two of whom pleaded guilty — have exposed allegations of widespread sex abuse on the

Now that the lazy days of summer are over, attorneys are on the move. Law school students are busy securing top-paying jobs at local firms, recruiting directors are hunting for new associates and experienced practitioners are surveying their options. In hopes of attracting the best and the brightest from the crop of law students who

Following Piper Rudnick’s agreement to acquire San Diego firm Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, DLA and Piper Rudnick are now due to vote on the ‘second leg’ of a strategy to build a world top-10 law firm. The new Piper Rudnick Gray Cary is a 1300-attorney firm. However the addition of DLA would create a

It was an embarrassing mistake for famed litigator David Boies, one that turned into what the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called “a lawyer’s nightmare.” Monday, an en banc panel decided 8-3 to give Boies a reprieve. The error — a missed filing deadline — was made by a calendaring clerk at Boies, Schiller

Staying with the outside counsel you know is the theme of Corporate Counsel’s third annual Who Represents America’s Biggest Companies survey. While some in-house lawyers say they are eager to break long-standing ties with firms in exchange for outside counsel with more attractive fee arrangements, most GCs stick with the large firms they know and

A close confidante of the Blairs has appointed the Queen’s solicitors to defend herself from being “hounded” over her private life. Martha Greene, 48, who was revealed by The Sunday Times last week to have helped with the purchase of the Blairs’ £3.6m London house, has been pestered with false allegations that she once had